March 29, 2007 by tmalaher.

With the advent of Sarbanes-Oxley, it seems everyone is hot to start changing their passwords on a regular basis. This is enough of a problem for people, but when systems need to use passwords to get things done automatically, it turns into a nightmare.

I started putting together a specification for a password “lockbox” that would handle this. It would have to be able to handle standalone machines that were their own security domain (e.g. Unix with local passwd file) or a group of machines that share the same password (e.g. NIS or AD). It would be nice if you could encode the password expiration policy and have the system automatically change the password for you so it wouldn’t expire. You’d want sophisticated ACLs to control who can see which passwords.

Yesterday I went to a presentation from a company about a product of theirs that seems to cover all of this and more: Cyber-Ark’s Enterprise Password Vault.

It’s not cheap, but on the old build-versus-buy continuum, I think this is one I’d rather buy.

Posted in Tools | Print | No Comments »

March 19, 2007 by tmalaher.

QueryForm: a Swing-based Java tool for editing database tables.

For those times when you just don’t want to write a CRUD interface or use raw SQL. DbVisualizer’s “Update where” and “Insert into” functionality is OK for one or two rows, but this tool lets you edit many rows almost painlessly.

powered by performancing firefox

Posted in Tools | Print | No Comments »

March 19, 2007 by tmalaher.

DbVisualizer: essential tool. I practically live in it. I have it open all day every day. I use it for ad-hoc reporting, quick updates, and to build up, debug and validate the queries I put into my software. It will connect to anything that has a JDBC driver.

One of the features I’ve used is the charting of foreign-key relationships to build a cube-wall sized poster of the data model for a product we installed. I pasted together 9 letter-sized sheets (the product knows how to print the huge image in segments). Life saver.

I use the free version, and I’ve even tried out the “personal” (i.e. for-pay) version on a trial license for a while and the graphing capability was pretty fun too, but I have other ways to do that and so didn’t go for it.

powered by performancing firefox

Posted in Tools | Print | No Comments »

December 5, 2006 by tmalaher.

My editor of choice, when not using an IDE like NetBeans:

jEdit - Programmer’s Text Editor

Features:

• It’s written in Java so it’s cross platform
• It has a million plug ins that do useful things
• Free, open source.
• It has a nice XML/HTML editing mode that does “code completion” on tags and attributes, and gives you a tree view and validation error list.
• It has syntax coloring for more computer languages than you can shake a Turing Machine at.
• It can even compile and run code from within the editor, so if you don’t have an IDE, you can turn it into a poor-man’s one, or use it for languages that don’t otherwise have an IDE, like Perl.
• It can remotely edit files over [S]FTP.
• There’s CVS integration (…note to self: check for Subversion integration…)

powered by performancing firefox

Posted in Tools | Print | No Comments »

December 5, 2006 by tmalaher.

Here’s a tool I really like, for editing XML files, especially ones that have useful “human readable” representations, like XHTML:

XMLmind XML Editor

Features:

• There’s a “free” version (lacking some features). Professional version isn’t unreasonable for a single seat.
• Written in Java so it’s cross platform
• You can easily create new templates for new XML schemas (just create or point at a DTD and a CSS stylesheet from a valid, minimal, but otherwise empty XML file conforming to the DTD)
• Has a plug-in architecture, and there are a few plugins you can get right from their site, as well as write your own.

I find myself using it to edit XHTML, DocBook and other XML file types (e.g. DITA).

The advantage over something like JEdit is that rather than telling you when you create invalid markup, it won’t let you create invalid markup. And it certainly won’t let you create non-well-formed markup. (If the preceeding distinction isn’t clear then read the definitions of well-formed and valid.)

powered by performancing firefox

Posted in Tools | Print | No Comments »

May 3, 2004 by tmalaher.

Who needs GMail? You’ve got your own CPU and Disk space, use it.

ZOE lets you read and search your email (with Lucene), without supplying helpful related advertising. Not to mention that it also has a very cool non-linear email access metaphor. Forget Inbox/Sent Mail/…customFolders.. you just browse.

Dan Moore links to a review of Zoe. I agree with much of what the reviewer says.

I’ve not had the problems with index rebuilds that he mentions.

It is a lot of files, but not much different than an equivalent MH mail store.

On the plus side, I was able to find a piece of mail that I absolutely could not find any other way. It was worth the entire download, run, import process (several hours) just to find that one piece of mail! (Outlook’s search just wouldn’t find it… i’m not sure why.)

Originally Posted May 3, 2004 12:08 PM

Posted in Tools | Print | 1 Comment »